How many people have fallen in love, or loved deeply in other ways, and wanted it to be real for a lifetime only to see it crash and burn? Well…who hasn't in some way?
The men who come to me for therapy to deal with their same-sex attraction feel love and attraction to men. Are those feelings real? Do they want love to be given and received unconditionally? What many, many people (especially people of faith) simply do not understand is that homosexual feelings are very real, and they are also based on a sense that love, sexually expressed, is real love.
But the real question, if one is trying to figure themselves out, is are their feelings founded on authenticity and reality of what love really is. And, does this kind of love last? I think there are most likely very few people who have fallen in love for the first time who have NOT been disappointed to discover that the forever love they felt turned out to be lost, or that their feelings changed. This applies to any sex, right?
Some men (and adolescents) come to therapy because they don't really know who they are. Some are in therapy because they've heard all their lives that they're defective and sinners because they have homosexual feelings. Some work on their issues because they sense there's something going on that's underneath their sexual feelings that they think is causing them. So far, ALL OF THEM have come to experience emotional injuries and crushing unfulfilled needs underneath the intense attractions for men that have arisen in their lives.
I wonder if any of you can conceive of the pain, anguish, loneliness and inferiority these men feel as they explore their feelings. I don't tell these men what to feel. The authentic awareness just come up when they experience their homosexual feelings in session...and my heart goes out to them. I have a very open mind and am fully conscious to never judge or react negatively to them no matter what they tell me they feel or have done. But folks, every single time, after seeing hundreds of clients from many cities and other countries, the same type of traumas surface within every client.
I'm going to challenge you to be brave and try to put yourself in the place of these men and boys who discover their traumas. If you can't see or feel what they feel then you'll never understand them, and you will never be able to truly help them. In short, I'm going to ask you to love them. And…you're going to have to wait for the next blog because there's so much here I'll have to talk about it on the next post. Talk to you soon.
